


Why Does It Have To Be Us

by Lady Adain (pocketTherapist)



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Established Relationship, For Science!, M/M, Mad Science Will Save The World, Somewhat Disturbing Concepts, UraIchi Week 2020, Yhwach Wins, no beta we die like men, zombies + people who can't die is Not Good
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:01:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24482467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketTherapist/pseuds/Lady%20Adain
Summary: So, Yhwach tried to merge the worlds. He succeeded--at the cost of his own life--and promptly everyone who had died, ever, returned. The problem with that was, there were only so many souls in the reincarnation cycle at any given point. The rest of the revived were shuffling, blank meat suits without any pilot.Or so they’d thought, right up until they found a pit full of bodies that weren’t coming right back up. Because the zombies were eating them. And they couldn’t die, couldn’t stay out of their bodies, only get shoved right back in with a less-than-stellar healing process, as they were devoured.So yeah, zombies are eating people. Alive, screaming people trapped in the shredded bodies until consciousness fades and does not awaken, condemning them to true nothingness.Kisuke thinks it’s Hell’s version of a joke. Or maybe an attempt to rebalance the overflow, or--The point is, they have to fix it.And, apparently, that's only one of the goddamn Symptoms.
Relationships: Kurosaki Ichigo/Urahara Kisuke
Comments: 17
Kudos: 103
Collections: UraIchi Week 2020





	Why Does It Have To Be Us

**Author's Note:**

> Day 4: Twisting Canon  
> Canon Divergence AU | Pre-Canon AU | Post-Canon AU vs. Gotei 13 AU | Apocalypse/Post-Apocalypse AU Battle | War

It’s not the screaming that wakes them up. They’ve all gotten used to it, terribly, the same sort of gruesome background noise that never stops. The Soulless don’t scream, of course, just kind of groan sometimes, but the Souled are awake and aware and it can take  _ weeks _ before there’s not enough of them left to keep screaming.

No, what sends them lurching into startled, wary alertness is the sudden silence. 

_ Absolute  _ silence.

Kisuke and Ichigo exchange a glance before they’re both diving for their gear. They’ve already got their swords, of course; they’re never far from them these days. Ichigo took to Kisuke’s old Onmitsukido training as readily as he ever took to anything, and it’s saved them both more than once. 

They have enough time to grab the module holding the recorded data and their packs before the first, muffled  _ whump _ rips through the building, and then they’re racing out the back door at something approaching full speed. They’re fast as hell, these days, faster than the speed of sound, but so are the destabilization pulses, and it’s always a race to see if they can outrun the shockwaves following behind. 

The first shockwave hits them a mile and a half out from the epicenter, but by then Kisuke is spinning to erect a mid-air barrier and Ichigo is putting his hand on his shoulder, feeding him the reiatsu to keep it stable. 

As soon as the wave passes they’re running again, a not-quite-frantic flight for safety. 

The second  _ whump _ comes thirty seconds later, closer to eight miles out, thrumming through their chest and reiatsu instead of their ears, and then a third a minute later. 

The fourth is strong enough that even the four hundred miles they’ve put between them and the source doesn’t stop the barrier from being shredded, from sending them both tumbling, shredding the bone armor from Ichigo’s back even as his high-speed regeneration heals the damage. Kisuke, sheltered from the blast by Ichigo’s body, keeps working, weaving the strands of Ichigo’s reiatsu into the basis for the garganta. It won’t take them between worlds--there are no  _ worlds _ , anymore--but it will let them get  _ far _ away. 

The moment the wave passes, he twists and  _ pulls _ , drawing Ichigo’s reiatsu through his body like a channel, and then Ichigo snatches him to his chest and  _ runs,  _ tearing through the wavering edges of space-time. Kisuke focuses on holding the portal open, stretching his focus toward their exit point and letting the entrance dissolve behind them, spinning off into nothingness as the space they came from does nothing so much as  _ cease to exist _ . 

They tumble through the portal and Kisuke  _ yanks _ it shut, tearing out the threads holding space open before the destabilization can catch them and follow them through.

They  _ really _ don’t want to destroy the fabric of reality. Not anymore than it already is, anyway. 

But hey, this particular end of the world wasn’t Kisuke’s fault, so they can be forgiven for taking a few risks in trying to figure out how to fix it. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

See, the last great war had been about death. And Death. And probably a handful of repressed father issues, as well. 

The point is, Yhwach  _ won _ . He defeated death, destroyed the Soul King, and sacrificed himself to destroy the boundaries between worlds. Death immediately became a moot point as hundreds of thousands of souls in Soul Society and Hell both were dragged back to life. 

Sort-of life. 

Because, as Kisuke (and probably many before him) said, there can be no life without death. Without death, life becomes meaningless. 

Just because the earth was suddenly mashed into Hell and Seireitei and also several times more populated didn’t mean it was all happy reunions. People found loved ones, sure. Sometimes. But Soul Society residents naturally lost their memory. Those in Hell were…. Not good before, but  _ twisted _ now, by the endless fight for survival. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of  _ millions _ of bodies that rose without souls, perfectly healthy but with no driving force, their designated soul long since moved on in the reincarnation cycle to their next life.

And then there were the Hollows--conglomerates of hundreds or thousands or more of souls, suddenly shoved into cohabitation with three worlds of souls  _ they can’t eat _ . 

Yeah, no one had been happy. 

Naturally, it only got worse from there.

The Soulless had been… more or less harmless. Annoying as hell, but not  _ dangerous _ . Just, always present, kinda nasty, bumping into everything, getting stuck in or on or under things, and being a general nuisance. Like really, really big houseflies. 

And then they started targeting the Souled. 

No one really noticed, because it started  _ slow _ . Really slow. You could just step aside when one was headed in your direction, you could push it off-balance and topple it over with a single hand on its back; how were you supposed to think that was dangerous?

People like to forget that humans used to be persistence hunters. 

Souled--the ones who  _ came back _ , not truly alive but not really dead either, same as everyone else these days--could get tired. Feel fatigue. Sleep. 

Soulless did none of these things. 

They didn’t know who had put it together first, but what communications were left went absolutely  _ wild _ when someone streamed a video of a Souled with a broken leg, getting swarmed--slowly--by Soulless. The videographer had thought it would be really funny to watch the annoyed Souled have to endure being stuck in a crowd of mindless sheep for a few minutes.

Five minutes in, the recorder dropped the phone, still live streaming, onto the ground and ran. No video, perfect audio.

The phone eventually ran out of battery, around six hours in. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Kisuke and Ichigo weren’t involved, at first. They could still use their spiritual energy, so they’d merely set up the barrier around Karakura and more or less continued as before. Ichigo ate hollows, sometimes, because he was exactly the right blend of Quincy-hollow-shinigami-human-whatthefuckever. They stretched the food for everyone else, and made him stronger as a (convenient? Ichigo still isn’t sure) bonus. 

Yoruichi was the one to drag them into it. She scouted regularly, her patrols taking her further and further from Karakura and the nearby Seireitei, and she was the one to bring back the news to both factions. 

Soul Society took one look at it and threw it at Mayuri. 

Mayuri took two looks and then called Kisuke, who brought Ichigo because that was how they did things these days. 

Kisuke looked for a very long time and then said, “Hm.”

That was not a good sign. 

Ichigo settled in to wait, and made a note to see if he could strengthen the wards around the edge of Karakura. There weren’t any Soulless inside--he couldn’t eat  _ them _ , but he could in fact atomize them, which was pretty damn effective in keeping them from regenerating--but he wanted to make  _ sure _ none of the ones out there were going to get in. 

Maybe he could get the wards strong enough to vaporize the Soulless  _ for him? _ That would be nice. 

There was a long period of a month and a half where Kisuke made precisely no progress at all, beyond determining that the Soulless--and the Souled, actually--were merely a symptom of the real problem, and not the problem, and thus could not be fixed without undoing the whole damn mess.

Rukia smirked when Ichigo explained this, and told him it was good he was on the case, because he ate the impossible for breakfast.

Well, he couldn’t really disagree with that. 

**Author's Note:**

> Well, today has been very interesting, what with the protests, riots, and then on top of that the Tr*mp/Epstein revelations, Diana's assassination... Crazy world. You guys stay safe out there!


End file.
